AI Agent Use for Coding in 2025

Professional Software Developers Don’t Vibe, They Control: AI Agent Use for Coding in 2025, a paper by HUANG et.al. in arXiv. it discusses the state of vibe coding and the control over code by experienced developers.

the extensive study gives an outlook of how we code in terms of motivations, strategies, sustainability and sentiments. they perform a series of field observations and an invited survey.

the study shows a divide in ai agents usage in coding. senior programmers have adopted a "trust but verify" workflow where they spend less time writing code and significantly more time auditing it. They use the AI to generate the boring boilerplate, but they ruthlessly gatekeep the architecture and logic. The AI isn't the architect; it's the bricklayer, and the human is the foreman walking around with a clipboard making sure the walls aren't crooked.

on contrary, the hobbyist approach is totally different. the "Vibe Coders" (hobbyists/founders) who churn out messy, fragile products quickly using AI, and the "Controllers" (career engineers) who use AI to build robust systems but refuse to let go of the wheel.

The scary implication is for the next generation of juniors. If AI does all the grunt work that juniors used to learn from, and seniors only want to micromanage the AI, the ladder for new human developers might be getting pulled up permanently. We might be heading for a world where you are either a Senior Engineer or you are nothing.

definitely an interesting read to get an understanding of the state of coding practice in the age of ai agents.

link:https://www.arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14012